(I couldn’t find any bearded [German] Iris)
This is a funny Valentine, but perhaps funny is as good an approach as any to a holiday whose simplicity has been as compromised by commercialism as much as this one has – and we know it can get still worse.
It’s also an ode to men, even if it might interest all the many kinds of people who love them.
With the significant exception of the affection shown between couples or groups which do not include a man*, Een kus zonder baard is een ei zonder zout [A kiss without a beard is like an egg without salt], according to a Dutch proverb I stumbled across for the first time today while reading Joshua Foer’s OP-ED piece in the NYTimes.
In any event, you don’t have to be handy in the kitchen to enjoy this treat, and absolutely no preparation is necessary. One or more affectionate warm bodies and nine or ten hours of total neglect following the morning shave should be enough.
My experience of its pleasures began while I was still a child, since I can recall the frisson of nuzzling the very serious moustaches of both my Grandfathers Gustav and Joh[an]n, and even the beautiful stiff black stubble my own normally clean-shaven Father [Clarence] had acquired by the time we all kissed him in the evening.
I’ll admit here and now that I was more than a little terrified of all of them, but when I became a man I took up the things of a man, so to speak, and I think nothing except cruelty has frightened me since.
While the beard I’ve [barely] cultivated for decades was initially, and so it has remained, mostly my response to the discomfort and tedium of the shaving routine and not an advertisement of my preferences in partners I consider myself very lucky to have always been able to find men who seem to appreciate salt.
I can’t imagine where I’d be today if Barry had not been in their number.
Only the best to all lovers everywhere, today and always, no matter how hairy-cheeky.
*
I’m pretty certain that in a darker age, when the men were putting together these proverbs we dig up occasionally even today, most of them couldn’t even imagine women could share a serious affection for each other, which just goes to show that, like all proverbs, this one has very serious limitations.
Author: jameswagner
Bec Stupak at Deitch Projects
Bec Stupak Doorway 1 2006 single channel video [detail of installation]
Once I discovered the conceit of this installation by Bec Stupak at Deitch on Grand Street suddenly “it all came together”, as strange as that clause may sound when used anywhere around Jack Smith, especially a Jack Smith occupying an additional dimension.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Bec’s blind remake of Jack Smiths legendary film Flaming Creatures. Using members of her demimonde, including performance drag group The Radical Fairies, Phiiliip, Agathe Snow, and other downtown celebrities, she recreates the 1963 cult classic based only on the impressions shes collected from others of what the film consists of.
I eventually found it very difficult to walk out of rooms whose silliness or campiness I had initially found so annoying, but most of that negativity was only about some 1960’s baggage I forget I’m still carrying around.
Barry and I were in the gallery three weeks ago, but since then whenever I think of uploading an image for the blog it’s one of these which comes back to visit – every time. A very special show.
Bec Stupak Flaming Creatures 2005 single channel video [detail of slow-shutter still from installation]
Bec Stupak Flaming Creatures 2005 single channel video [detail of still from installation]
still sticking with snow
These two storm details were captured during a walk across West 22nd Street late yesterday afternoon.
The first image reminds me that snow isn’t so fussy about spreading its largess; even man’s stuff get’s the full treatment.
The second picture makes me think of spring at the same time it describes this classic winter scene.
Oh yes, you can believe me: These are not really black and white photos. The available light was very grey.
McDermott & McGough at Cheim & Read
POST CARD
Mc Dermott & McGough The “Warm” Friendly Feelings Embodied in a Red-Pink One, 1964 (2005) oil on linen 96″ x 96″ [detail]
Mc Dermott & McGough Schlitz Beer, 1961 (2005) oil on linen 48″ x 60″ [detail]
For years they’ve been almost a guilty pleasure for me, because I was so sympathetic to their aesthetic, but it’s harder and harder to find traces of the guilty part.
The Cheim & Read show was a delight, and I’m sorry to see it’s now gone.
“[another] True Story Based on Lies”
micro view of macro snowstorm
untitled (snowfolds 1) 2006
untitled (snowfolds 2) 2006
untitled (snowfolds 3) 2006
I’ve always gotten off on the voluptuousness of snow forms, but these sexy folds are the least approachable part of a great storm – unless you stick a camera out of a breakfast room window.
Plamegate updated and illustrated
Juan Cole cuts through all the mendacity this morning: He describes, in the clearest possible fashion [and richly illustrated] the crimes of Bush, Cheney, Libby and Rove as they relate to the Valerie Plame story.
Cole’s good, but it’s really all over now, except for some of the shouting. Even after the revelations in today’s news, I see his account primarily as a lesson in why it was so important to get Alito appointed.
Listen to the administration’s assertions of the legitimacy of their own spying ever since the wiretapping story broke. They know that everything they have done and will yet do really is perfectly legal and constitutional, because the Supreme Court, as Bush has now constituted it, will end up ruling so.
And don’t think that this crew will ever have to surrender their power. Everything has finally been put in place for the perpetuation of a one-party state.
And we can’t do a thing about it.
Those who have refused to play along have to be asking how much time they will have to get out of the country.
Stefan Tcherepnin joins Amy Granat at Oliver Kamm/5BE
[a long time exposure in the front gallery]
[a quicker shutter during the performance in the second gallery]
It almost doesn’t get much more exciting than this. I suppose I mean Chelsea.
We stopped by at Oliver Kamm’s 5BE opening tonight because . . . , well maybe just because, since at least one of us hadn’t done his homework. I couldn’t remember who Amy Granat was, but I did remember an intriguing subtitle, “Scratch Films / Stars Way Out (for O.K. )”.
Somehow I had confused “scratch” for “snuff” so I must have been the only one surprised to find the show was totally devoid of prurient interest and in fact safe for children of all ages.
Safe, except perhaps for the volume of a very special 7:30 performance, but more on that later on.
The work is very good, and looking at it I immediately remembered the great show she had put together in the gallery’s 22nd Street location.
Granat is a sculptor who works with sound and light (as well as some of the more substantial materials of the form) and that includes, by attacking and scratching the material’s own emulsion, the fabrication of totally abstract films for projection.
What we saw in the first room of the gallery space was excitng and very, very beautiful, but I selfishly found myself slightly disappointed. I had assumed at first that the almost total darkness and the jumpiness of her white projections would mean pictures were impossible.
In the end I was surprised that my camera managed somehow to suggest the experience (absent the sporadically-explosive soundtrack and the whirr of three projectors) of being in that very dark room. The second room, where Granat had installed in one corner a more passive sculpture of her own film stills made corporeal and delicately lit by a flood or projector lamp, would have been even easier to document, but Barry and I quickly fell into an animated conversation with friends while a larger crowd filled the gallery and blocked a view of the work.
We eventually left the space to visit several neighboring galleries also opening shows tonight, and then we returned for the performance Oliver had told us about earlier, partly because it had succeeded in advertising some of its charms through the walls which separated 5BE from the neighboring gallery.
I squeezed into the back room, emboldened as a documentarian by the challenge of relieving Oliver’s obvious dismay over the fact that his own camera had just died. One projector (from the front room?) and an ancient synthesizer had been thrown onto a small table along a wall. Granat was manipulating the former and some mad, modern troubadour was operating the electronic boards. Barry later described the environment as something of a 1960’s or 70’s downtown happening, but what does he know? Wasn’t he busy being born about that time?
I loved the intensity of the music,, which I’ll evoke here by referencing Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 “Metal Machine Music”, quite possibly my absolute favorite experimental music album.
I got a few pictures and I was so wrapped up in the energy of that room I didn’t really notice the alarming decibel level of the music until after I had gotten onto the sidewalk. Barry said he had not been able to deal with it and never really made it into the room. What, what’d you say? Can’t hear you
Leaving the gallery I spotted a thinly-packaged CD taped to the counter. Of course I bought a copy; my passion for new music actually predates and has totally survived my addiction to underknown art. Only when I got back home did I really take a look at the modest description on the paper sleeve. The artists were listed as Amy Granat and Stefan Tcherepnin. I knew the name Tcherepnin, but couldn’t remember the given name of the man I recalled as a very important electronic composer. Besides, hadn’t he died a few years ago?
I did a bit of Googling and then I recalled that early in the evening Oliver had shown us the synthesizer in the office of the gallery and had said something about the father of Granat’s collaborator having assembled it himself in the 70’s. Bingo!
We had been priveleged to watch and listen to this very execiting member of the fourth generation of a remarkable family of composers in a collaboration with a visual artist equally as exciting.
Oh yes, I can definitely recommend the CD. Not quite as intense as the work performed in the gallery, it did good service as our dinner music tonight. But then our musical tastes accomodate some pretty strange stuff. Some people might need some chemicals.
On his site, Barry shows and broadcasts moving image and [very loud] sound from tonight’s performance captured on his little magic phone!
Download 136K 36PP movie
For another, somewhat more gentle sample of Tcherepnin’s music see this Oberlin site.
dad’s boards
there’s nothing like a good cloud, or two
Welcome competition for the skyscrapers.
The picture? Yeah, I know this is pretty dull stuff, even if you think a beautiful sky, or at least it’s appreciation, is an exceptional thing in Manhattan. So let’s just say this post is an interlude.
needing a thumbs up
Sticker-decorated but otherwise empty Gay City News box seen on 6th Avenue this afternoon.
Anybody out there know anything about the image?
the cartoon war, and Thomas Hirschhorn at Gladstone
Thomas Hirschhorn Superficial Engagement 2006 [detail of installation]
Thomas Hirschhorn Superficial Engagement 2006 [detail of installation]
Most of the commercial media has decided that Americans shouldn’t be shown the drawings which seem to have made the world go crazy over the past week, but this absurd delicacy is only the latest, and certainly not the most outrageous, insult to come from those who do a pretty thorough job of controlling access to the outside world for all but the most curious of our compatriots.
Americans, unlike almost all other peoples on the planet, have not seen the notorious Danish cartoons, but, even more importantly, they also have not seen the messy images of burnt, ground-up, chopped-up and gutted bodies which have haunted and angered people everywhere around the world for years.
We are being treated as children and we’re doing a pretty good job of justifying the censorship and restrictions to which children are subject. Of course I have to admit that as a nation we haven’t actually shown much real maturity in the last five years, but heavily insulating an already embarassingly-provincial people who make up the most powerful and most war-like state on the planet just doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Where are these notes going? Well, I’m trying to tie together the two experiences which have so disturbed my mind and my sanity this week. I haven’t been able to do any art posts for days because I’ve become so depressed following developments in the cartoon war, but most of all because of finally being confronted with crude photo reproductions of the most obscene and grotesque scenes of death as inflicted both by our oh-so-innocent selves and a lot of people who see us quite otherwise.
On my first visit to Thomas Hirschhorn‘s extraordinary installation at Barbara Gladstone last week, I was so overcome with the power of the piece that I was unable raise the camera I was carrying aound in my right hand. Several days later I decided I had to make my way back in and try to get something I could upload here, if only for the sake of anyone unable to make the pilgrimage to West 24th Street by this coming Saturday. I felt like I was profaning a sacred grove; I was nervous as hell, and I got in and out as quickly as I could.
Is it the pictures downloaded from the internet or is it what the artist has done with them? Why is moving through the groteque clutter of this gallery space so moving an experience? I don’t think I can answer the question, at the very least because as an American who hasn’t been surfing on line for these images what I saw on Saturday is still too much of a shock, even though all along I’ve considered myself pretty well informed and had thought that nothing about cruelty could shock me, short of being placed personally in its midst.
See Jerry Saltz’s “Killing Fields” for more questions and a few answers.
I will say that it is surely the most courageous show in the city right now, and that I admire both Thomas Hirschhorn and Barbara Gladstone for bringing it to us.
How can we match such a gift? We could start by growing up and putting the censor out of business.
ADDENDUM:
This note arrives with the clarity of the next morning. In a much better world it could even form the basis for reconciling the irreconcilable.
I admit that as an atheist I’m hardly in a position to preach here, but with all respect it seems to me you’re missing the point if, in the name of avoiding the dangers of idolatry, you make the unseen image into a fetish.
The real obscenity is the evil which produced these photographs, and the blasphemers come in every description.